 really practice that vocabulary with each other in the attempt to strengthen one another's ability to be able to apply for this funding and to be able to make a strong case for why my project, why now, why this community, why this grant. And I think that that's empowering to all of us in the sense that, you know, language is power. And having that language of the funders is difficult and annoying and frustrating. And I can completely sympathize with that. By the same token, I read those grant applications. And I like to see someone who's articulate, who's thought it through, who can show me impact, who can show me that they've considered all of these options, that they've considered ways to measure and evaluate. And yeah, it's the boring stuff, but it's so necessary. It's so, so necessary. So I hate to be kind of like the downer in the room, but I just, I want to bring that in early because I think that it sets a sort of framework that's important to outline just at the beginning and also to push against it. So I'm not like singing its praises. I'm just kind of naming it and putting it in the room. But just a little further along, my personal belief is that socially engaged practice is really about working from need. It's working from where there is a need for something to happen, whether it's a conversation or a social action or a direct action or collective action. So for me, I think it's kind of like, who is this for? And why? And why now? And why this? And in what way? So working directly from what the source of that need is, rather than I have a story I need to tell, my need is my personal need. Really, it's about how do you kind of feel out what's in the ether, what the need of the ether is. And I think that that is often, that often leads to a kind of grassroots based approach. So you're working more from bottom up, getting a consensus and getting a feel for what the need is around you and your immediate locale and your immediate community, rather than kind of helicoptering in with I want to work in this place. I want to go there and work with those people. I want to go there. So I think also, again, the funding community is more interested in this rather than this right now. They're more interested in locally engaged, community based, creative practice, creative practitioners. So I'm not going to use the word be. I'm going to say be. But yeah, I am part of that. And then finally, I just want to maybe distinguish. Can we just make sure, sorry, could you just mute your microphone for a second? Sure, I'll find a way to do that. Hello, everybody. Apologies for being late. Perfect. I'll introduce you in a minute. So hang on. And I'm so glad you could join us. But oh, I'm sorry. Jonathan, so glad you could join us and we'll look it back to you in a minute. So when you're not speaking, if you just keep your microphone muted, that that helps with the feedback here. Thank you. Thanks. Can I speak one like final little point? I won't belabor this, but I do I want to kind of also put in the room a false dichotomy that socially engaged practice always has to work on a nonprofit model. I don't think it does. I don't think we're talking strictly about nonprofit versus commercial. So I kind of want to challenge that as well and push back against that. But I will put out there that I think that the gift economy is something that is needs to be further explored and better understood. And what that actually translates to in terms of artistic practice and how we work and how we get the things that we need. And also how we perpetuate a generosity of spirit that gives more back to our own community and back to our fellow practitioners and how do we increase the abundance of everybody's work overall. So I'll leave it there. Thanks. Thanks, JJ. Somebody from the side. Can we introduce Jonathan? Yeah. I did a little bit already. Hi, Jonathan. Welcome. Jonathan, as I as I mentioned is artistic director of the fence. I think I said the fence is an international network for working playwrights and people who make playwriting happen across Europe and beyond. Jonathan, we've been discussing these questions. I keep wanting to look at him up there, but I should look at him over there so he can see me. The questions of what socially engaged theater is, what that means to you, how you use it, how you have what that means in terms of your actual artistic practice and then how you determine the effectiveness of what you're doing. Those are the questions that we're dealing with. Do you want to hang in and listen for a bit and then jump in later? Sure. That sounds like a very good plan. Okay. Great. Well, we're so glad you're here and we'll get back to you. Somebody on this side want to jump in? I'll jump in. Rebecca Martinez and another thing that for me is I work with Sojourn Theater, but I also work with the Center for Performance and Civic Practice, also founded by Michael Rode. One of the things that in terms of definition, because there are so many floating definitions about what is socially engaged, what is community engaged, what are these things, how do they appear to public, where we've actually worked to define for ourselves clearly what this means. When we talk about social practice is actually how we phrase it, is maybe the spark or the creative idea comes from artist and then there's a match found in the community and maybe the artist is the one working in response to the community as in OIC that this is happening. We are having an interaction and then I create the work. An additional work that we do as well is called Civic Practice, which is where it's actually the partnership is something that starts first, where the artist and the non-art sector community partner come together and have a conversation or build a relationship that very much involves the artist and this is also we work with artists who are not theater based artists as well, but they start the conversation and the artist is creating really actively listening to what the partner is saying and specifying as their needs and then the work comes out of that. Could you give an example just so that we get a clear idea of Civic Practice? Yeah, we're actually working a collaboration is happening now with Nashville and they are doing work with public art artists who are working in public art and to just talk about this idea of how as a public artist how do you go into a community? How do you talk to someone? How do you how does your work sit in community and is created in relationship? So not just going in and here I'm putting my art in this area but I'm having a conversation with maybe an organization or a for example an organization that works with people who are experiencing homelessness. So how does my conversation and my work and finding the needs of what those people in that community have and then create the work listening to what that is which may very well change what that is because maybe they don't need a big sculpture maybe what they want is a table where they can sit in eat lunch or something like that. So thinking about that in terms of what needs are. Great, thank you. Yeah, you got Johanna, you want to? Responding a little bit to what JJ was talking about fighting for the idea of the arts as being something useful in society. I feel like we've been going down to Washington and sort of fighting for this for a long time this idea that arts are useful and explaining what the what theater has to do with the conflict resolution and I say well what story have you ever seen what play what child's fairytale what myth have you ever seen or heard that wasn't about a conflict and how it gets resolved and that's what makes it interesting. So I think like slowly over the years sort of like pushing that idea that theater is in fact conflict resolution or problem solving and maybe they're finally getting it so this is this is great and I find that even around the world people are sort of getting that. I think that we were sort of last in line to a certain degree in getting that idea because people have been using theater as a way to carry information as a way to engage communities for centuries and we're just sort of last on the bandwagon. Then I think all theater should be engaging of course I like that you said buy for and with communities because it's different working with a community than working for a community and over the last decade we've ended up specializing in two things that wasn't really our grand scheme of things but working very very quickly with people that have no theater training whatsoever and so because we were working in Afghanistan with women we ended up creating all women's theater groups and these women and girls that we were working with had never seen theater and had no experience with theater whatsoever so really starting from scratch and I had to think back on like what what did I learn in theater 101 what were the exercises we did and you know you really have to kind of start with well first of all you face outward towards the audience and take your hands away from your face and you know sort of some basic things but working with artists is of course always so much fun because we all speak the same language wherever we go in the world we can always work peer to peer with other artists we all have the same games we all have the same exercises it's always remarkable to me that that's true wherever you go artists speak the same language you can you can do something immediately it's not like there's no standing around uh what do you want to do I don't know what you want to do it's like you can really just jump in it's it's so encouraging but this idea of creating something very quickly is a challenge that we've been facing and so we've we've come up with some specific methods that so we can create a play in a week and just a week ago we returned from Azerbaijan or maybe two weeks ago and we were commissioned by the embassy which is very nice to work with university students and create a play and they said can you train the students and then create a play and then we'll tour around the whole country and you'll come for a week okay and I was like well I think we might need more than that so I was sort of like going for a month we compromised it three weeks so we had one week of training with 22 students and then we worked with a select number of them to create a play in one week and they were not theater students I think there were a couple that were theater students and then we toured around the country for the third week and we did it I don't know how but you know like we pull these things out of our back pocket and it just you know it just works and everybody just everybody gets it you know they kind of get it it takes a little while maybe the first couple of days are like what are these people doing with us this is really weird and then after a while they kind of see it all fall together and then they play and you know it's fun so I think the reason why we do socially engaged theater besides the fact that it's really fun is that you know you're you're bringing something to the community it's like a gift and you can speak about topics that were never spoken about before and this is always interesting because once once the cat's out of the bag there's no putting it back once you've talked about domestic violence and that was never talked about it's out there and even if they're sitting there like this and they don't want to talk about it it's in their brains now and that's that's really always exciting we're always dealing with topics that don't want to be talked about even just getting girls on the stage to speak and the fact that they're there is a social engagement because now they know they could do that and now other people know they could do that and there's no putting that back in the box either um relating to the idea of evaluation I think there's two different kinds of evaluation these the evaluation you do for the funders which you know you just do it whatever and um we can talk about that but it's a little boring uh and then there's evaluation you do for yourself and you know we go back we always invest a certain amount of time in a community we don't just sort of drop in and goodbye we go back again and again and that's where we can really see that we made a difference and um that's the best way to evaluate because you see what they learned and then what they did with it how they took the ball and ran with it and then then you learn again from what they just did and then you offer somebody else and it's back and forth so that's the real evaluation all right um so I uh I teach um I write plays with advocacy in mind or social content I guess I I create work in communities so the tenderloin opera company we work with people who are homeless and uh I I network and I I do all of these things on on a barely functional level but not non-functional so I I keep falling forward into it um my my thinking about this is is um well let's see if I could be compact about it um drama is made of change change in fortune from good to evil and evil to good but also change in energy spiritual energy and cardiovascular energy it's just made of change and those changes are made socially um we must be making out of change and in a social manner because we intend to cause social change as we are made so we so we do in order for that change to be sustainable it should be on the one hand grounded in the source of being itself so pre articulate um an energy before the property of language and then in the not yet that which is has yet to be in that space of hope and possibility the activity or the medium best suited to to uh uh faring the not uh the pre articulate into the not yet is a poetic language which is a language so vibratory vibrating so quickly that it's almost invisible so we're after creating a a social experience centered on a kind of silence and invisibility that is radically unstable and always creative and about to about to be created that's why someone like um donald trump is anti art because he's about social fixity social immobility or un unchangeability where there is a kind of persistence of entitlement that will never go away that's irrefutable that can be walled walled up so artists by operating outside of the bounds of conventional language and property uh destabilize uh ownership through the social spectrum i hope i hope that that's right in in terms of in terms of um assessment um i feel that my work is going well the more silent and invisible i am the more it moves rhizomatically away from my listening and into others speaking and the more that that speaking itself voids itself and vacates itself and becomes silent until there is an infection of listening and then ultimately all the world will be listening and the only art will be the music of the spheres it it may take a couple of years but um but uh yeah that's i guess that's the idea yes clap hallelujah yeah that was like a poem it's beautiful um the bechtel project my name's yens rasmussen the bechtel project was born out of an observation of a need our mission is to tell stories that pass the bechtel test which will admit is on one level arbitrary our goal though is to change culture by changing the stories we tell we believe that the stories that we see too often push women to the to the peripheries of the stories and that by being careful about the stories we choose to tell that the stories we tell the stories we tell the stories we imbibe affect the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves in the world and that we need more stories that put women at the center of the stories or as virginia wolf said uh women that are not shown only in relationship to men um so we'll know that we've achieved our mission when our mission is irrelevant when when everyone else is telling stories that that make our existence unnecessary uh in our education program we have more concrete ideas for um what's the word our success uh in our education program we actually start each exercise or each residency with asking the participants to draw a hero we we they take a piece of paper and they draw their idea of a of a hero and then we go through the entire workshop of of exercises and discussions and then we have them draw a hero again and uh the changes in that drawing is kind of remarkable when we stole that idea from the draw scientist studies there's decades of research about the draw scientist and and people's image of a scientist is of course what you would expect an old white man with glasses and a lab coat and blah blah blah there are similar we're finding similar uh preconceptions about what a hero looks like and again you wouldn't be surprised predominantly male and things like that strong blah blah blah so that's all i have to say right now yes my name is chantal bilado and i my work um for the last 10 years my work is focused mainly on climate change um and i i it's funny in coming to this day today i had to think about uh how i defined socially engaged um practices because i wouldn't have included myself in that category i guess uh because i inherited the the definition from um funders and i do not fit in that category because usually they want work that's being done directly with communities to respond to a need in that specific community and that's not um what i do um i my plays are a mix of i guess documentary in fiction so i travel to the place i'm going to write about it's usually because i'm writing a series of plays about the countries of the Arctic um i go and visit those regions and talk to the people and then the resulting um play is a mix of uh conversations i've had people i've met and then some of my own research and um that play doesn't necessarily go back there i mean i would like to but sometimes there aren't even theaters in those regions um so it's a little bit of a it's a little bit uh bringing stories of uh people who we don't hear their story specifically in here um in the developed world but what we do in terms of uh climate change affects them a lot and um so it's it's kind of uh being a translator bringing bringing their stories to um us to be able to understand what's going on um on the other hand uh i do i so i yeah so i'm coming back to this definition and i've in thinking about it i i think so maybe socially engaged theater is um something that responds to a need a very specific immediate need um in society and in that sense i would include what i do um in that definition um i do think that um climate change is a big problem for sure but it's a symptom of something much larger that um a sort of existential crisis on the at the level of civilization and our ability to address it we'll we'll determine how we continue to evolve as a civilization um we don't uh we the story we don't have the stories yet in the mainstream at least that are allowing us to make a big shift this is a big transition i believe and if we in the theater and i think the theater is really the place to do this because we are um small we are local and we are in the best place to create these new stories and tell these new stories that are pretty can be very shocking um and then plant those seeds one by one and then see them grow and it will take a time it will take a it will take some time before it grows to something that's more mainstream but i think it it is our responsibility to start um and then in terms of impact i would love to i'm actually thinking right now about sort of scientific uh ways to measure impact um because it would be useful if i can do that with what i'm doing which has to do with climate change then we can apply that to everything um but the impact that i've had is like i think like everybody else it's been anecdotal so and it's it i find that it's more most powerful when you don't ask for it um it's you know when you when you ask people to fill surveys it's selected you know they people pre-select and then it's in the moment but the most satisfying impacts i've seen are people who will write to me afterwards and say like for example the most recent one i've had was a student um i had i presented a play at kansas state university and a student wrote to me about two weeks after somebody i didn't meet who wasn't in the theater she just came to see the show and she's an undergraduate student and she wrote that um she wasn't aware of these things that the play opened her eyes and as a result um she's in an english class where she has to write a research paper and she decided she was gonna write it about climate change so this was um for me it was very satisfying and it had a huge impact on that person and i was very pleased that she took the time to write to me and tell me about it but i felt that that was one of the biggest success because it was um first of all it wasn't somebody i worked directly with and also she chose to reach out to me to tell me her experience so it felt like it was very genuine great thanks shantel um you only okay i was gonna go okay go trace it i just wanted to respond to shantel quickly i'm i'm a very i have anything a lot about impact um and i'm very interested in your thinking about the scientific ways to measure impact um that could be a great breakout group um so a lot of the things i work with like i did a one of your climate change events um and i also last year i've been working with a syrian playwright and and translating presenting his work in the u.s. and with that type of thing rather than it's not you know there's not um a way to really measure the direct impact we hope that through presenting that work we people will empathize and be able to kind of take this giant problem make it smaller but for me as an artist it's always a struggle to see with when you're working with such large huge issues that are kind of incomprehensible and somewhat unsolvable for us in a room like this how do you measure impact and is it even important is the impact enough that you hope that someone's viewpoint has changed or you hope that they go on and educate themselves and can you follow up with that um so i think that's something even when i did your climate change event you know we were so focused on okay what can people take away from this what action can they do and i don't know if that focus is always good as an artist or if we should i should just relax and say hopefully they do something um but that's something i struggle with and that's something i'm curious to hear from other people in the room later um it's impact important is important to measure impact and in what circumstances um is that important okay uh sarah yeah hi um i am thinking right now about um jessica's description of isa's big ass idea because um i find that really inspiring and um and i think as i'm sitting here and listening i'm i'm realizing that there's lots of people in this room who have sort of influenced me um in the work that i'm doing right now i'm sort of new i guess in a way to um thinking of my work as socially engaged practice um and i'm actually also thinking of it uh from a visual arts perspective right now too um so i think there's this uh so like relating to what rebecca was saying about the public art um i i'm just really interested in that interdisciplinary aspect of things and um and the conversations that influence and resonate no matter where they happen um uh and so just to tell you a little bit about uh the project i i'm engaged in right now that's my big ass idea is um it's called 36.5 a durational performance with the sea um and i stand in a tidal bit it's a series of works performances where i stand in a tidal base starting at low tide and i let my uh i let the water rise up to my neck and then it goes back down again so it takes uh between 12 and 13 hours usually and um and it really it started in when i was at an artist residency in main on a very small scale um and really was just an an idea that i had in this moment because i was thinking about uh the challenge of artists to survive in new york uh and and then i was also thinking about in parallel to that and i was seeing this connection to the challenge of humans to survive in the face of sea level rise um and i saw this tide rising and i just and i covered this rock and i just imagined a human out there and i was like i have to create that image and i'm a director so i was like who can i get to do this and then i realized no one was gonna do it for me so i had to do it myself and and then as i was out there in the water i really had this moment i was like oh i think i have to keep going with this i think this is a series um and i think i have to try to do it um in different parts of the world and so that's what i'm doing so i did it in main and then mexico and then san francisco and the netherlands last summer and then um next year or this year ha it will be in bangladesh um so and and then the idea is to go to every continent and i think i got that idea from shantel actually because she was like therapeutic um and uh and and then come back to new york in 2020 and and i guess as i i'm learning i feel like every play every iteration that i do i'm learning what it means to be um engaged in the community and what it means to um to have a socially engaged practice in some way um and and i love what eric said about the infection of listening um because i think that uh that is uh that resonates with me deeply in terms of how i approach things um and for me i guess if i was as i was thinking about it before i was thinking about it's it's about connecting to strangers it's about creating space for conversation it's about surprising people um in positive ways um and it's and it's about thinking locally like very personally and thinking globally um very universally and that dichotomy that binary so i guess uh i just wanted to ask a follow-up about um how do you engage the community um in in specifically with this kind of work sure so um so i uh i when i go into a location now and this is developed over the course of the different iterations but um i invite people to come stand with me in the water and um and there is a in san francisco we developed i developed a movement phrase with um with a choreographer and so and then she started it and then it got passed along so that the public is invited to participate in this movement phrase that happens after every hour that i've been standing out there um so it's really subtle but it um but i've actually in terms of impact i think one of the most meaningful things that has happened to me was in the netherlands um i had a couple old men tell me that that they had like they they go in the water almost every day but that standing in the water with me for an hour they both stood for an hour um that they had this completely different sensorial experience and totally changed their idea of uh of body embodiment and water sensation and resonating on all these themes and to me that was that was actually one of the most meaningful things because they had this they were surprised they didn't think that it would happen or they would have a new experience and yet they did um so that's great oh thank you i want to bring jonathan uh meth in uh jonathan either you are in london uh it's good to see you or seeing you on a big screen here at lamama downtown theater space um how do you respond to these questions for in your own work um hello david um and everybody and lovely to see you can you hear me okay yes very good great um so my work um covers a range of of different things so i might kind of move around a little bit in the answers that i try to give to what i've heard so far today um i don't know if my practice is socially engaged since the first question was about definition i guess other people will determine that um uh one of the things that i that i i heard just just um in this last few bits of conversation was was the difference between that which is top down and that which is bottom up and i guess i see the function of curating a network as trying to inhabit the space in between and i think probably a lot of my work tries to inhabit a space in between let me say a little bit more about what that might mean beyond a sort of abstract idea um it kind of links to a sort of philosophical premise as well which is the notion that the center is everywhere um various people have attributed it to pascal or indeed people that go back a few centuries beforehand but i've always quite liked that as a notion um particularly in relationship to things like mainstream and margins which often influence discourses around uh diversity or indeed disability um and even gender uh when we tend to talk about things um in particular kinds of plans i like the idea of the center being everywhere because it allows for possibilities to be generated in all sorts of different ways from all sorts of different directions and whilst it's very important to acknowledge that power does indeed institutionally usually move from the top to the bottom and need is often best articulated from the bottom upwards to the top the possibilities of where an impetus might come from in relationship to something that might have meaning for some people in relationship to artistic practice seems to me to be very varied and that my interest is to try to engage and capture the possibilities of that variation so if i just go back a little bit i spent 15 years running what would be described as the grassroots very much bottom up organization in the uk whose remit was to support playwrights and a playwriting culture across the islands england scotland wales and northern ireland and try to make sure that the artists in this case playwrights didn't suffer from what we call in uk a postcode lottery where depending on where you happen to live and the level of access you might have to local provision depends on your experience and your life as an artist so that's my background um uh what i learned from that was that um that whilst the main stage play on the royal court might be capturing most of the press and the column inches and a large slice of public discourse actually the playwright that's working with a group of single mothers on a housing estate in east yorkshire um it's just as valid and just as important and so that formed part of my practice in trying to develop a playwriting culture and to encourage playwrights to think of themselves as multi-dimensional creatures um who were quite capable should their interests and passions and engagements dictate of moving and working in all sorts of different contexts the natural movement then from that sort of impetus is to create and curate a network where you try to bring people together um in this case now through the fence across europe and increasingly internationally towards some kind of opportunity that might generate possibilities for what might be socially engaged practice but that ultimately whether that impetus comes from the artists or the circumstances or the geography or the encounter or an analysis of social need or the kind of existential crisis that chantal was talking about i have no great things to say um i do believe that the possibilities come from people seeing things in slightly different ways and i think partly that might be my job shall i leave it there and see if people have got comments or questions that's great thanks thanks jonathan yeah perfect that yeah so it's uh it's all about creating the possibilities for those things to happen that's great i want to bring in eva and jessica into the conversation so eva um well i feel quite humble to be up here um because i and i uh in my life in general and especially in my art life and especially here i try to own the mantle of the youngest child the one who doesn't presumes that they don't know very much um which i think informs a lot of my practice um because what i think when i think of social engagement i think about um creating an opportunity to denaturalize the systems the ways of behaving within the systems that were a part of so thinking about the funding models that were a part of the institutional context that we have to navigate there are these implicit value systems inscribed into that and so what i hope to be doing always especially and i think you know theater and performance is the ideal context for sort of like new social conditioning um with people is to create a space that has a very specific set of ethics and um that those ethics inform the way that you engage people in the room on an institutional level on a funding level and it does bring in these really important questions of like how do you access resources how do you access funds what kinds of if you know if i've created an ethical process that says that you know i have to be considerate of the you know ecosystem that i'm a part of both creatively materially conceptually how do i then make decisions about and and do i even have the luxury of making decisions about these practical things um and so that's that's where i'm coming from and so i think that so maybe just to make it a little more concrete like my my current project takes the performance logic of the scouts and all the maybe positive things that that has to offer like the boy and girl scouts um and then thinking through like what are the ethics that um that i have that might be different from that kind of a process or what are the and what are the alignments and so in moving forward and trying to get people to be a part of this or you know opening it up into a group beyond me and my collaborators establishing the ethical principles at the core of that project inform all the subsequent decisions but you know aesthetic practical um and beyond so i'm really curious to hear about because i assume you know i don't know how anything works i want to hear from everybody else maybe what those kinds of considerations are in your process we'll hear a lot about that and maybe uh just yeah i just want to i kept wanting to jump in because uh jonathan i'd love you to talk a little bit about the other work that you do because it hasn't been brought up yet today which is the work with and a sort of large network around the world of people working with theater with disability um so i'd love to hear a little bit about that um the heat collective is uh it's interesting jj challenged me recently about what do you why you call it a collective it's just you and i said and so i and so i so i so what and i have an answer but which took me a few days but i um because really the heat collective the reason it's heat it stands for healing education activism and theater i'm a drama therapist i'm i'm an educator i'm also a scholar i'm also an activist and and i'll explain what that means in a second and for the last um 35 years since i was two no for my my whole adult life i've been i've been a theater artist and it's the only thing i know how to do unfortunately um is to either teach write act or direct theater that's all i know how to do and that's the language that i speak so um everything is filtered through the language of theater but i also bring in elements of healing and drama therapy elements of theater of the oppressed elements of playback elements of psychodrama elements of everything in in the workshop in my workshops in my teaching i really bring all four elements together and that's the paradigm it's just a paradigm it's just an idea and it's not a it's just one idea it's one approach to engagement to me social engagement means building community and um for me the impact is if people are talking together afterwards and i think a really good dinner party can be just as effective as a really good piece of theater if people are engaging deeply and honestly so um i just want to say a tiny bit about the a the activism um because that it can either be a kind of to uh all the wonderful things that people have talked about i also wanted to jump in when sarah was talking because the impact that sarah has also i was i was um able to be a little bit a part of the san francisco piece by getting some san francisco press there and what i found out afterwards is that every everybody has some pride about their body of water and so there was a great deal of pride about sarah being in the bay you know for them and and her standing in their water brought a real sense of um engagement so that's the that's the word that i'm always looking for but the a let me say this that on the theater without borders website we have a struggling piece which is the artist safety page and this is i'm i'm saying this really specifically as a call for um support see me if you're interested in this and this is something that involves really reaching out to artists who are in danger in in all over the world but particularly performance artists because there are agencies and organizations that support journalists isa was supported by an organization called free dimensional that helped him come to the united states um there's free muse for musicians but we are really struggling to build a network for artists at rift theater performance performing artists at risk um and so that means that if we have an an actress in afghanistan whose life is in danger because she's an actress we find ways of getting things like lawyers and visas and things that i is a theater artist and clueless about so it just means building a network and so we have this volunteer network so if you're interested in helping out with that please see me and that's that that's the a the theater part i'm a playwright and a performer and part of that is i did this my my big ass idea was having this emma goldman day yesterday um i also had a play that was done at lamaman will be done here next year again and jonathan and i are working on it in london as well called my heart is in the east which brings the conversation between jews and muslims together um so so my my idea is bringing all four of those elements healing education activism and theater together uh through performance and curriculum and the only way i know that it works is if people are talking together not to me but with each other afterwards so great thank you um we're going to bring everybody here into the conversation um and uh there's a chair there's an empty chair and there's empty chairs here if you want i just did want to just bring up one uh point i've been so inspired by what people have said already um my my work with uh theater the oppressed i work with a group called to nyc theater of the oppressed new york city and in this question of impact has been really on my mind a lot because we work with we collaborate with groups like covenant house and ali forney center and and create um you know forum theater plays for those of you who know the boal work forum theater plays with uh with these communities and i think what i'm struck most by is how i bump up against my own um limitations my own uh grounding the edges of my grounding as a as a as an artist as a person as a a person with with prejudices and with uh with ingrained ideas about about people and i'm constantly being challenged myself and when i think about this question of evaluating uh impact it actually always starts with me like if i feel and this is something that eric just sort of reminded me of a little bit in what he was saying but when i feel um in that in the unknown like unsteady about oh my god i'm i'm i'm i'm you know i'm bumping up against ideas about my in myself that i don't like or that i feel uncomfortable with that's when i realize that something's going on that there's that there's impact that there's something happening because i'm changing i'm questioning myself a lot and i think you know we can try everything we want to do to help engage people and and make change but i think it's got to start with us and and we have to change in order to embody the change around us and so that's that's what i've been struggling with a lot lately i just wanted to put that into the into the mix here um please uh anybody who would want to participate um come forward or stand up or i'll hand you the microphone and i'd love to hear what you guys are thinking what you have to say yeah i see all kinds of like note writing i'm curious like right can you um can you come up because um then they can hear you too so i'm convoluted and pregnant with all these ideas and i'm a i guess i would call myself a documentary live documentary filmmaker my name is geogeller and i do films and i started doing theater before that and i guess i've continued that as a way of of my own experiential concepts so my point is that i believe that where we are is we're about caring for the imagination not only the imagination of the individual ourselves but of the people who see our work and the people who are collective societies and that in in essence who we are is looking for our own identity in each other and our theater and my documentaries are about individuals who are challenged who don't have a voice people who have spent 20 years in a mental hospital and one guy who spent 27 years of an illegal life without parole sentenced in prison and their stories are in my mind to give us a little light a little insight into who we are and who we can become because they've all seen something that maybe we can all learn from like you're a theater of the oppressed and your question is how do i know i'm making an impact and i think the impact we make is on ourselves what we learn and that i think of myself more as a social sculptor one who looks at at theater without audiences at times and so my question is to myself as well as who are we and who do we want to become and what will people of the future say about us today hi i'm nerina cocky and i have a question for sorry i didn't get your name between Eva and Eric Joanna um you said that um you feel that theater artists share the same language and it's something i really don't feel i'm italian i grew up bilingual french italian and i came to study in the states and now i'm back in europe and um i don't feel this language sharing and i was wondering if you could talk a little more about your experience between the relationship between language and community so how i'm curious what language do you run your workshops and do you have a translator do you have an interpreter um how do you and maybe this is for chantal too i mean i'm a translator and often you struggle with how this thing that makes sense in this culture how does it translate into another and what are what are the points that we share as human beings and what are the ones that are really hard to get across but that are actually where the ideas get articulated and for me what is the really the question what is the relationship between language and community is fundamental because through language how do we express ourselves and community for me is society and therefore the social engagement yeah that and it's a good question and it always comes up of course because you've been working in different countries how do you speak to each other uh first of all bond street theater really focuses on physical language a lot body language and there's a lot you can do without ever saying anything if you go into a refugee camp and you're suddenly surrounded by like 500 children what do you do and you know people ask me that it's like oh i'm going to go work in the refugee camps what do i do you know people like this you know tiger or something you will just have like 500 kids following you around doing followed leader you don't have to say anything um with adults it's a little different of course and yes we use translators uh as we wish um you know we're we're working in working with people that never did theater you're trying to sort of ease them into the idea that they have a story to tell and how are they going to tell their story and obviously they're going to tell their story with their bodies but they're also going to tell it with their voice so that's where for us the translators really are very important but we start very very simply so if they're telling a story you say what what what would you say to the policeman who who just was dismissive and then they say something really really simple it's like that's okay because the next time they do it they can see something a little bit more complicated next they're in the they're writing their own plays they're finding their voice they're finding the language and in a way we're kind of the the bystanders and and we're sort of like guiding the process of them just finding what they want to say what's on their mind and and how they're going to say it and then shaping it so that they can do that for themselves in the future if they've never done theater before so uh it's always a challenge of course and there was something else that you said that was really interesting that i want to respond to she talked about the the relationship between language and community which i think is i don't know yes yeah yeah exactly so um when you're speaking to the community of course in their own language this is the the thing about doing things for people or with people or by people would sometimes we're just guiding people to create their own plays in their own language in their own community and that's that's the community engagement and it's very often when you're using these kind of interactive techniques afterwards whereas maybe not exactly forum theater but a dialogue with the audience and sometimes we're just bystanders for that we're having the the interpreter is telling us like what did he say but uh if there is a shared language then of course we're a little more participatory um in places like uh me and Mara where we're also working you know sometimes it's an English speaker it's fortunate that there's more English speakers around the world than you know it makes us a little lazy but and and you know i i i speak a little farsi now so it's helpful but um uh i think when you're engaging the audience on a very personal level like that when you're having a dialogue with the audience at the end then you really do need to have uh the language and um if there's no words whatsoever uh as the we did a Romeo and Juliet without any language all throughout the Balkans during the Balkan wars no language was necessary so it can go either way but yet the audience was completely engaged and um what they said at the end i'm not sure you know it's like uh uh you find out because you have translators I don't know does that answer your question in a so as a translate because i'm a translator i think a lot about language and um i uh i started off as a translator thinking you could you know you could bring something from one language to another i had very idealistic notions and then eventually i realized now it's always an approximation but um i would i would say this in relation to community um i am uh originally from Canada so language is a big thing um and i'm from Quebec so it's a big thing and um the would the first play uh set in the Arctic that i wrote is called Sila and it's set in the Canadian Arctic and i gave myself the challenge because of those power dynamics between the languages um there are three um three groups represented in the play French Canadian English Canadian and Inuit which is the indigenous population in the Arctic and i decided that each character was going to speak whatever language they would speak in any given situation in real life which makes it a little tricky and um even with that i had to compromise a little bit because i have some Inuit characters in the play who in reality wouldn't speak anything other than their language so i had to give them give him a little bit of English and then but he still has passages where he speaks only in Inuktitut but then the play was done in in theaters where they didn't have projection capabilities for translation so even that i ended up you know compromising but i think it's nice to it's nice to be aware of the power dynamics behind languages and it's nice to at least strive to do something to change that as we're uh yeah go ahead Rebecca sir we're just thinking oh sorry Jonathan Jonathan was that i would like to sort of jump in but maybe Lisa go ahead then okay Rebecca sorry uh issa and then Rebecca sorry Rebecca can go first okay you are such a gentleman i'll be quick i'll be quick well we were just thinking a lot of of this idea of language and translation and common language and whether it be between two different countries that speak different languages or communities that speak different languages but also artists who have a specific language and maybe non-arts partners who have a different language so we do a lot of work of listening and what are the common values and what are what is the mission or what are the ideas or intents and goals and starting there so that we can develop on project to project or community to community we are developing a common language and a common set of terms so that when we speak to each other we know what we're our intent is and what our ideas are so that it's a very very necessary and something that we've spent a lot of time thinking about great thanks issa yeah thank you David um i would sort of like to jump in to say that um we actually don't need the language because um the body moving is a language itself for example i am a teacher and um i see myself as an educator and i live between two worlds and we have um in our daily lives certain things that we're dealing with all the time that anybody on this planet can understand gravity time space and daylight so i can give you an example i traveled to sweden a couple years ago for a conference and i was there in june can you hear me okay yes okay i was there in june for about a week and when there was no a night in june for three and a half weeks there's not night you know it's continuation of daylight all the time so i i went back home because that's why i run my project in the summer and my first audience the first person in my audience in the village is my mother so i have to explain to her everything that i've discovered in the west so i told her about the story in northern sweden where there's no uh night for three and a half weeks and then she went like it means that the moon is lost i said no the moon is not lost so to explain to her the solar system i have to use a soccer ball a kalabash is very round and then a lamp you know so a lamp represented um the sun kalabar represent the moon and then the soccer ball represent the earth then i start sort of animating the the solar system to her so she can understand what's going on with the gravity time and space so i think to address some issues we really don't need words i'm saying i'm saying that because i am from a country where people speak 260 tribal languages so we use language all the time but most of the time i take people from the west to work with me in the community they don't speak the language so the only thing we have to introduce to them is the culture for example the first person who come to the village you're not allowed to hang your your leg front of the chief you don't cross your leg front of the chief because it's very offensive so that's a body language we have to understand in the culture and then the many other things to understand in the culture that we use as a theater because life is life itself is a theater so we actually don't need a language as long as we understand the culture and then that's where it's like a platform to share knowledge and understanding i think that's my take on that great thank you thank you he said uh jonathan did you want to jump in there unmute he said and i i um i kind of think very similarly in many ways um but i do tend to work with playwrights um who who who despite all protestations will sometimes resort to words um even though they know probably they shouldn't um and it's it's for that reason that the motto of the fence network is misunderstanding each other since 2003 because in that sense uh i agree very clearly with with um with my uh italian colleague who just asked the question um but i do think it's exactly what isa says i think that dramaturgically the process of translation is absolutely one of cultural understanding and cultural engagement so actually whether you're working with words or whether you're not working with words the process is kind of pretty similar but i really like chantal's formulation of the notion of approximation because it seems to me that this is life life is actually approximation whether it's uh you and your mother in the village uh uh there's never going to be the exact understanding of what it is that you're thinking and you meaning it's only ever going to be an approximation from the point of view of the other and therefore the task in a way is to investigate the modalities of approximation and how to make them accessible um so in a sense it's a curation of that divergence whether you choose to use language whether you're working in refugee situations it's always context specific but it will always be an approximation great uh thank you uh tarans did you want to uh jump in here and have have not uh heard from you in a bit the idea of measuring impact because i think it's such a frustrating uh topic uh whether it's uh for internal use or external use whether it's for the funders or the audience or the artist um there's uh there's something uh you know deliciously ambiguous about theater and the impact that it has and the emotional change and it's long term and it's immeasurable and it's beautiful uh because of it and then we are forced into these you know metrics uh whether you know the funders wanted or we wanted internally because we want to see if uh an assumption that we had or a theory that we posed uh is it accurate is it not accurate um you know for example if you're working with a new community we are doing a project with the islamic center here in oakland and we've been working with them for since 2010 so this is the sixth year and uh you know how how has how has this project changed how have we changed as artists working in the at in the center and how has uh the audience been impacted by our work how how has the staff at the center been impacted by our work is it worthwhile like this question of is what i'm doing worthwhile as an artist as an artistic director as someone who wants to change the world uh so the question of impact is an important question and to be able to understand it is really important at the same time i uh you know i i'm from iran i come from a culture that is driven by poetry and the endless layers of meaning in one word and i celebrate that ambiguity and i celebrate uh vagueness and i take pleasure in in uh the uh the quality that art and theater has that is uh not measurable and how do then how do i prove to myself and prove to others that the work that i'm doing is worthwhile i pose that as a question to to your panel and to your participants and humbly request guidance great well it's a wonderful question and one that uh we'll continue to discuss um at this point um what we'd like to do is we'll maybe hear from a couple more people but we're gonna lose our uh connection to the uh our guests who are appearing on the uh live stream um shortly and what we'd like to do is to break this this group into smaller groups where you can really get into discussion and everybody could have an opportunity to speak to whatever uh part of this conversation you want to continue so we'll the way we'd like to organize that is to have our panelists go to different parts of this space and to have you uh go to have a conversation with them specifically who whoever you'd like to continue a conversation with so um uh should we just jump right into that or do you want to anyone else want to um engage with with our our international guests before they leave someone want to come up and talk because we have a couple more minutes for that so yeah it'd be great if jump up yeah come on up you back there there's your hand back there yes come here um i just want to offer another say your name please i'm jessica burr and um i run a theater company called blessed unrest here in new york city and we have a sister company in kosova called teatri oda and with them we create uh bilingual plays and we tour them around the Balkans and we perform them here in new york but we create them um without the need for translation so we structure the plays um so that if you only speak english or you only speak albanian you don't need a translator and it's not an easy task but um i find that it's very rewarding um in that we get to watch audiences first take in a language that often they haven't been exposed to albanian is fairly obscure and very ancient um but also over the course of a show once they get the language um sort of in their ears they begin responding to to mostly humor um and to cultural things that they hadn't been exposed to before and so i think there's a great value in that um i i agree with joanna and that we share we share language with theater people across the world when we jump in and start working together and i run a physical theater company um but we do use language as well um there's something in the flow of the work that's inherent and that is is apparent in the work and for me that's just extremely rewarding thank you thanks just uh anybody else uh yeah i've i've got a big ass idea that might actually connect these two topics that we're discussing the impact and the language conversations and i want to put it out there because if you want to take this idea take it please because i really want some help with it so here's my idea i'm going to illustrate right so it goes like this you're you see a show wow what a show that was so that was a show you come out of the show and there's a box and it's like oh a little box it's like a photo booth kind of a thing or um you know like a confessional so you pull back the curtain you go and you have a little seat and there's a little screen and push the button and it says okay tell us what you thought about the show ready three two one and you're like oh well um i don't know it made me think about this and i have this question and that part was cool and i didn't really get that and that's it it's like a one minute testimonial on video and then maybe there's like three more questions and it's like what did you think about this particular aspect of the show or did you think that that idea came across or were you confused it you know any sort of like leading question that you as the theater artist want to know or the funder might want to know that you can put in a little quick push a button on a screen format and then you have the option of emailing yourself the video sharing it on social media or not you can opt out of all of those sharing things if you wanted to but then there would be like a little tick box where it's like do you mind sharing your video confessional with the people that made this theater piece or this art piece or the people that funded this art piece and you could tick yes or no you completely opt in or opt out right and that's it the whole thing takes like two and a half minutes and then you leave the box and you close the curtain and why is that interesting because i think people are attracted to that experience of a confessional of a private moment it's not someone in your face with a microphone asking what you think it's not a baseline survey that you have to tick boxes before and then tick boxes after and i think that that provides two things i think it provides qualitative information and quantitative information and if i were a funder and i were giving money to something i would want to see not only what people thought and what their responses were to those questions but what did their face look like you know how what was their body language so kind of connects these two ideas in the sense that we're moving past language and we're trying to figure out ways that we can actually not always have to translate our audience's experiences but let them just speak for themselves and let them show for themselves what they thought how they thought about it so i'm calling it a box box i don't know how to build it i don't know how to make the app if anyone has any ideas i would love to talk to you about it um have they done something like that okay cool i feel like it's gotta be easy right you just gotta make the little app like a little pop-up thingy that can fold into a little bag and you take it and off you go i'm done thank you jay jay uh i want to take this opportunity to uh have all of us uh together thank our uh foreign uh guests our visitors uh tell her questions chelage is uh jonathan thank you so much i also want to take this opportunity to just really thank culture hub for being they will not be with us this afternoon so we're we're not going to have this option i am i just uh got my phd and and and in in theater as a vehicle for social change and did my whole dissertation through culture hub and all of my committee was live streamed in and um decided it was also on howl round and all of howl round got to find out whether or not i i pass so um she passed but they are thank god but um it was it was uh they are just such an amazing and they they came here usually they're over in great jones in the in the culture hub office but they brought all the equipment over here this morning to to be with us and to give us this great opportunity to live stream these wonderful people i just wondered if rita has been has she been able to be here at all jesse okay okay well rita is a wonderful um youth program in nigeria but we we got her for about three seconds but we lost her anywhere they're they're geniuses and this is a way of really um connecting the world uh in in a beautiful way so thank you so much did you guys want to say something yes i'd like to say that before we go i would like to tell everybody that whatever we're doing it's always possible any dream that we have out there any change you want to make in the world i know the world is the man is a mess but it's always possible remember that you're not working for nothing it will it will get somewhere it will get or somewhere there is a change to make and thank you very much for putting this together thank you thank you this inspiring yes yeah my one quick thing is one thing that's been on my mind and i know we don't usually think is a theater community of broadway as part of our community but in a season where oscars so white was such a focus um i mean the tony nominations have not come out yet but i believe that in terms of theater with eclipsed and hamilton and even last year with curious incident of the dog in the nighttime that there is theater happening that that actually is both commercial and impactful and i think that we would do a disservice to ourselves in new york especially as hard as it is to make work in new york to try to continue to distance ourselves from the commercial world because actually that's a huge platform and with the conversations in our community about parody and about um voice and about bringing different perspectives and then the mechanism that we have uh and the expediency we can can do that with is very different than what the film um industry has and we always think i think in um in the theater that somehow we don't have a seat at that popular culture table or that impact table or that larger audience table or that reaching more than like 30 people or 60 people but that we actually can with theater especially now with the internet and the way to be able to reach and have conversations all across the world in a place um and and also figuring out like what is the importance still of making work in new york it does new york still really have um a leadership point of place in the theater community um anyway it's something that it's making me very excited to just think in it's kind of the larger picture about the difference between theater and film and the difference between our commercial community and what we've produced in this season and what the oscars were doing so that's all i want to add oh my name is caroline pru um i sense uh everybody needs a little bit of a break and we're going to do that as we move into these smaller group discussions so uh david jonathan sorry sorry just jonathan jonathan before i go um if if i could oh sorry go ahead john thanks sorry um just before i go jessica mentioned on passon um uh disability arts and um we haven't really had time to explore that and that's fine um my work is based on the premise of offers and requests so my farewell is um my offer which is that if people are interested to picking up on the mention of curious um incident of a dog in the nighttime if people are interested interested to explore disability aesthetics then please continue the conversation with me offline thanks very much for having me it's been really interesting and illuminating uh enjoy the rest of your day thanks jonathan and thank you for your generous offer thank you jonathan thank you lisa thank you thank you charange uh we appreciate you being here with us and thanks lisa um we're going to say so long for now see you soon but we will bye report back stay in touch that's the whole idea here stay in community um okay so in order to continue the conversations on a more more personal level so everybody would have a chance to participate we'd like to move into some smaller group discussions so we have uh let me just explain the geography first of all if you go out this door the way you came in um and straight back on the right there's a room we call this the classroom you are the only participant in that room for one conversation in this lobby area where the coffee and snacks are could have one or two smaller conversations in this room here we could have a we could probably have about three or four different smaller conversations if we move some chairs around so what i'd like to encourage is that i'm gonna ask you guys to go to a particular spot and then other people to follow uh and uh go to have a conversation with whomever they want david perhaps we should um have go and have the panelists go in pairs to each place yeah okay how do we pair them up okay so okay so climate change is going to be here in this room over up on this side uh what did you want to Rebecca um and social community and social values conversation will be uh in that corner over there um then we have uh some there seems to be a conversation about evaluation and and uh who wants so that's that would be jj and somebody else has merged it in the evaluation topic yes we need to say goodbye to everyone on live stream so oh okay hey everybody on live stream we're gonna say goodbye to you now and move into the next phase of our conversation um thanks hall around thank you culture hub it's been great all right um